THE NEW YORK TIMES: The MAGA crackup might finally be here

This weekend, Donald Trump picked a fight with two Republicans in Congress and lost.

The president has reportedly been apoplectic about a House vote, which could come as soon as Tuesday, ordering the Justice Department to release its files on sex-trafficking financier Jeffrey Epstein.

On Friday Trump attacked Thomas Massie, the eccentric conservative who, along with California Democrat Ro Khanna, spearheaded a manoeuvre to bypass House leadership and force the Epstein measure to the floor.

Massie’s wife of three decades died unexpectedly last year, and on social media, Trump mocked him for remarrying. “Boy, that was quick!” he wrote, adding, “His wife will soon find out that she’s stuck with a LOSER!”

Then, on Saturday, Trump lashed out at Marjorie Taylor Greene, a MAGA die-hard who has been loudly demanding transparency on Epstein, calling her, among other things, a traitor.

Trump seemed to be trying to dissuade other Republicans from voting yes on the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which Khanna wrote. But many were still planning to defect, with Massie predicting as many as 100 Republicans might join him.

Such defiance, Khanna told me, would show “how weak Trump’s hold is becoming on his own caucus, and it may signal the beginning of the end of Trump’s dominance.”

Perhaps Trump agreed, because on Sunday night he reversed course, announcing that Republicans should go ahead and vote for the release of the Epstein files.

In doing so, he avoided a humiliating public rebuke. What he cannot avoid, however, is the growing disillusionment among conservatives with their deeply unpopular lame-duck leader.

The last wretched decade shows that reports of a MAGA crackup ought to be viewed somewhat sceptically. There have, after all, been many moments when Trump seemed to be losing his grip on the right, only for his hold to grow stronger.

But a few things are different now. In his first term, Trump inherited a good economy from Barack Obama, and the establishment Republicans who surrounded him prevented him from tanking it with major trade wars or mass deportations.

Much of Trump’s base distrusted these figures, seeing them as part of a deep state cabal trying to thwart his populist agenda. But they shielded the country from at least part of the price of Trump’s erraticism.

This time, however, Trump came into office with a much shakier economy, and, unrestrained by Washington technocrats, has proceeded to make it worse, putting the country in a sour mood.

“The five-alarm fire is health care and affordability for Americans,” Greene told Politico. “And that’s where the focus should be.”

For a while, Republicans could dismiss polls showing public unhappiness with Trump as fake news. Such denial has become harder in the wake of this month’s elections, in which Democrats made outsize gains virtually everywhere.

As Axios has reported, Republicans are now worried about the possibility of a Democratic upset in a Tennessee district that Trump won by 22 points.

When a president becomes a drag on his party, it can have a psychological effect on partisans. Suddenly, flaws they’d barely registered come into focus. (Recall, for example, how many Democrats refused to see Joe Biden’s age-related decline until it became a political emergency.)

We may never see a Republican stampede away from Trump, but some of his supporters are experiencing a moment of clarity about his character.

Even before this weekend, many conservatives were livid about an interview he gave to Laura Ingraham of Fox News explaining the need for H1-B visas, which American employers use to hire foreign workers for certain high-skilled jobs.

The visas, Trump told Ingraham, were necessary to bring in talent. “We have plenty of talented people,” Ingraham said. “No, you don’t,” Trump replied.

To many Trump supporters, angry about both immigration and an increasingly bleak job market, his words were a slap in the face. “We’ve never seen an administration crash and burn in its first year so badly,” wrote Anthony Sabatini, a Republican county commissioner in Florida.

A few days later, Mike Cernovich, the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorist and MAGA influencer, posted a surprising critique of the administration.

During a visit to Washington, he wrote, “the talk of everyone was how overt the corruption was. It’s at levels you read about in history books.” Many, he said, were asking, “Do people just think Democrats will never win and they’ll all get away with this?”

Now, no remotely savvy person can be surprised by this White House’s epic graft. When Trump was riding high, his acolytes appeared to enjoy watching his vulgar profiteering trigger Democrats.

But as Trump burns up political capital on personal enrichment, some on the right might be starting to suspect that it’s not just the libs being owned.

It was against this backdrop of conservative disaffection that Trump rebuked Greene and Massie. Many right-wing influencers reacted with unusual fury, some posting images of burning MAGA hats.

Trisha Hope, a Texas Republican who was at Trump’s rally on January 6, 2021, wrote that she was no longer entertained by Trump, and was “beginning to find him repulsive.”

Scott Morefield, a columnist for the right-wing site Townhall, called Trump’s posts “cruel in a way that should make any human with basic empathy question what kind of human he is.”

It would be easy here to make a crack about leopards eating faces. But in the past, when Trump has turned on Republicans, his base has tended to follow.

Trump ended the political careers of Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona, once a darling of the Tea Party; Bob Good, former chair of the right-wing House Freedom caucus; and his own first vice president, Mike Pence.

His inability to stand up to Greene and Massie suggests that something has changed.

Trump’s grudging endorsement of the Epstein Files Transparency Act is kind of absurd, since he could, if he wanted, simply instruct the Justice Department to release the files.

Even if Khanna’s bill passes the House, Trump will have levers to thwart the files’ disclosure. Republicans might kill the measure in the Senate, where it needs 60 votes.

Last week, under pressure from Trump, the Justice Department announced an investigation into prominent Democrats who’ve been associated with Epstein, and the administration may say it needs to keep the files under wraps while that inquiry is open.

But even if the files never come out, it’s increasingly clear that the MAGA coalition is fragmenting. On Monday, I asked Morefield how significant he thought the fissures in the movement were.

“I think it’s pretty serious,” he said. “Epstein really started it. It was like the crack in the dam, I think.”

Even if the dam holds for a while longer, we can now see how brittle it is.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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